Just a Cowboy. Rachel Lee
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someone to talk to again. Someone she needed to talk to or seem discourteous. For the last several months she’d been on the run, exchanging as few words as possible with strangers, lying about her name and even keeping her communications with her lawyer as brief as possible.
She’d been living off cash from her mother’s estate, using pay phones and basically doing what she had heard was called “living off the grid.” All because she was getting a divorce. All because Dean had gotten furious with her and told her she wouldn’t live to collect a settlement, and then a few weeks later some guy had attacked her and tried to drown her.
Even the cops didn’t believe that Dean had been behind that. Even the cops. But she knew Dean in a way the cops didn’t. She had seen his ruthless side, and when it came to money, few were as ruthless as Dean.
She sighed, and the man in the seat beside her in the old pickup looked her way. “Something wrong?” he asked.
“No. Just feeling tired I guess.” Being tired covered a multitude of sins and failings, at least with people you didn’t know.
“Yeah, I’m a little worn out, too,” Hank said. “But it won’t take long to get you some food. Enough for a day or two. We can always come back another time.”
She was still trying to absorb this helpfulness. She wasn’t used to it—not anymore. In the world she had just left, you paid for help or you didn’t get a whole lot of it. Heck, even her few girlfriends thought she was nuts to leave Dean. But they didn’t know.
And in retrospect, she wasn’t sure their lives were all that much better. Did a woman have to sell her soul to live in comfort, belong to a country club and move in the right circles? Maybe so.
The main thing she wondered about was how she could ever have thought those things were important.
She cleared her throat, trying to think of something casual to say. Had she even lost her capacity for pointless conversation? After so many years of it, she would have thought it was engraved in her brain.
Except the man sitting beside her didn’t seem like the type who would appreciate the inanities that had made up so much of her social life over the last eight years.
“Why,” she managed finally, “do you think Ben rented me the house if you didn’t want him to yet?”
“I plan to ask him. But, as I said, the real estate business isn’t exactly booming around here. We got that new semiconductor plant five years ago, and for a while it looked like we were going to become the kind of town people didn’t keep leaving.”
“But?”
“But they laid off about two hundred people last fall. Doesn’t seem like much until you see all the empty apartments and houses, and see the way local businesses are struggling again. Boom and bust. Story of this town from the beginning.”
That at least gave her an opening. “How’s that?”
“Well, first they found gold up there on Thunder Mountain.” He pointed to the looming mountain range. “That played out in about ten years. Then came a kind of heyday for ranching. Lots of cattle, lots of wide-open space, enough water, believe it or not. Those were the days of the big spreads, and folks in town were just here to supply ranchers’ needs basically.”
Kelly nodded. “And then?”
“Raising cattle got out-of-sight expensive, people wouldn’t pay the price, beef got shipped in from Argentina and things turned kind of black around here for a while.”
“And now?”
“The ranches are mostly smaller, some folks still make money off beef, some are raising sheep, others horses. Then we got the semiconductor plant, and for a while there were plenty of jobs for young folks, and people with special skills moved here and we kinda grew again.”
“But now it’s bad.”
“Now it’s rough. The way it is everywhere, it seems. We thought we might get a ski resort up in the mountains, but that folded up pretty fast. We aren’t close enough to a major population center to have a load of people drive out here, and while we’ve got an airport, it would need a major expansion to bring in enough skiers. I guess you could say we didn’t have the kind of money necessary to make ourselves attractive.”
She nodded, absorbing what he was saying. “So everyone here is hurting?”
“Not really. We’ve just gone back to our belt-tightening ways. We get by on what we have—it’s not like we’re going to dry up and blow away. I guess it’s just kind of an interest of mine, to think about how this town starts to grow and then shrinks back again. It’s almost like breathing.” He chuckled quietly.
“That’s a different way of looking at it. But I agree. This place doesn’t look like it’s going away. The first thing that struck me about it is that it seems to have always been here.”
“Not quite always, but well over a century now. Was that what made you decide to stay here? Because we sure don’t seem to have a lot to offer most people, at least ones who didn’t grow up here.”
She hesitated, trying to find a way to put into words what had made her pause here in her journey, without revealing too much. “I guess…well, the place just feels…” She hesitated again and then gave a nervous laugh. “It’s sounds stupid, but when I got here what I felt was reliability. You know, like you could always count on this town.”
He turned into the grocery store lot and parked before he spoke. “Maybe that’s a good word for it,” he said finally. “Reliability. There’s a lot of that around here.”
Then he paused. “Well, except for Ben Patterson. I told him that place isn’t safe yet.”
“Maybe he just figured it wouldn’t be a problem because I wanted it for such a short time.” She bit her lower lip. “Look, if you want me to move, I will. But it’s just so hard to find a place that doesn’t want to tie me into a long-term lease.”
His gray eyes focused on her with an intensity that made her nervous. As if he were seeing things she was sure she hadn’t revealed. Then came the question she had hoped to avoid but had known, deep in her heart, she wouldn’t be able to.
“Why do you want to keep moving?”
It was, however, a question for which she’d already thought up the answer, weeks ago, just in case. “I’m traveling around the country is all. I finally reached a point where I could do it, and so I just decided to do it.”
To her it almost seemed as if he frowned, though she couldn’t point to a single thing in his face that changed. After a moment he shrugged. “Some folks have wanderlust, I guess.”
“It’s not exactly wanderlust. It’s just that…well, I might never get the chance to do this again. It seemed like a good time.” She hoped she never had to do this again, but that was a different story, one she wasn’t prepared to discuss with a stranger. Nor was she about to tell anyone that the only hope she cherished was that she had covered her tracks well enough. Sometimes she feared she hadn’t.
He seemed satisfied, though, and climbed out of the truck. She came around from her side and watched him stretch a little, as if things ached.
“Being a cowboy is hard work?” she asked, deciding to let him explain it any way he wanted.
“It can be, but damn, it’s great. Wide-open spaces, sleeping under starry skies, cooking over campfires. I like it.”
“Do you do it all the time?”
He twisted his back a little then shook his arms. “When there’s work. When I can.”
The answers sounded short, so she let it go. She was hardly likely to press him to go places when there were plenty of them she didn’t want to go herself.
They shopped separately and met back at the truck. She had only bought enough for a